


pressure dripping off your shoulders

by oopshidaisy



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Communication Issues, Dennis Has Big Feelings, Fix-It, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Panic Attacks, Post-Suburbs, Sharing a Bed, Sleeping arrangements, The Rainbow, dennis' attraction to tom cruise is both regrettable and important, for a nice change of pace, or just trying to make sense of what happens in canon, pining Dennis, they were banging in season 5
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-12
Updated: 2018-10-25
Packaged: 2019-07-29 20:46:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16272035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oopshidaisy/pseuds/oopshidaisy
Summary: The first thing Dee says when they get back to the apartment is, “I’m gonna be sleeping in between you two.”





	1. built a fire in my mind

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by my ongoing confusion about mac being happy to sleep next to dee in the king-size. spiralled out of control because of my big feelings about dennis reynolds

The first thing Dee says when they get back to the apartment is, “I’m gonna be sleeping in between you two.”

“Uh, no,” Mac says. “I’m not going next to you. No way!”

Dennis, fiddling with the coffee machine, is conspicuously silent. He hadn’t spoken during the drive back, either, not even to protest the outcome of the bet. His hands had been clenched around the steering wheel tight enough to cut off circulation. Mac doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say to make things better, so for once he doesn’t even try. Dennis has barely glanced in his direction since they left the house in the suburbs anyway; it’s best to leave him alone and wait for the storm to pass.

“Dee, I would rather cut off my balls than sleep next to you.” He has to make an effort not to look to Dennis for support. Ganging up on Dee has always been an easy thread to pull them back together. “Seriously.”

“It’s not like I’m thrilled by the prospect, either,” Dee says, rolling her eyes. “But under no circumstances am I letting you and Dennis go next to each other. No.”

“Why not?”

He thinks Dee’s going to sprain her eyes if she keeps rolling them like that. “Be _cause_ ,” she says, in a voice like he’s a particularly troublesome toddler, “you’d either murder each other or start banging again, and if either of those things happen in the bed I’m sleeping in I’ll have no option but to kill myself.”

“What do you mean, ‘again’?” Mac squeaks.

Dee looks intensely smug. Mac thinks about all the ways to make it so that no one would ever find her body. “Dennis told me.”

Mac wishes they’d eaten each other in the womb.

“What the fuck, dude?” he says, rounding on Dennis. There’s a dribble of coffee running down the side of his hand, dark liquid unsettled in the mug. His expression is approaching the realm of apologetic – enough of a rarity that Mac’s anger subsides a little.

“I didn’t…mean to,” Dennis mutters.

“But he did,” Dee squawks.

“Whatever, asshole, it doesn’t matter. We stopped doing it years ago,” Mac says, avoiding everyone’s eyes. “It wasn’t like – I mean…”

“We know,” Dennis says, still quiet but with more of a bite, “you’re _not gay_.”

“I’m not!” It sounds childish: _I swear I didn’t eat the last Poptart, Mom_. “It doesn’t matter anyway. We wouldn’t do…that.”

Dennis, who’s downing his – presumably – still-scalding coffee like it’s a pint of beer, says nothing.

“I don’t care what you think you would or wouldn’t do, I’m sleeping between you. Unless Dennis has anything he’d like to add?” There’s something malicious in Dee’s smile, something that forcibly reminds Mac that she’s Dennis’ twin.

Dennis’ throat works, but no sound comes out. If Mac had to pin a label on his expression, he might call it ‘fear’. Nervousness, at least. It’s near-impossible to reconcile the Dennis stood before him with the Dennis of a few short hours ago. At three pm, Mac thought Dennis might really kill him. It’s seven in the evening, now, and Dennis looks like he wants to die. Anyone else might call it impossible, but Mac has spent twenty-five years learning to understand the shattered stained-glass of Dennis Reynolds. Even if he can’t always figure out precisely how the shards fit together.

“Leave him alone,” he says, not pausing to examine the protective instinct. “Fine, Dee, I don’t care – you can go in the middle. Dennis is on the left, I’m on right. Anything else? ‘Cause I could really use some sleep.”

Dee’s frowning, for some godforsaken reason. Frank made sure that the king-size was waiting for them when they got back, so Mac stalks into Dee’s room without another word and slams the door behind him. Lying on the right-hand side, his eyes trace the cracks and fissures in the ceiling. He imagines it caving in on them while they sleep.

Dee and Dennis remain in the other room, discussing something or other with lowered voices. The sounds are too faint for Mac to pick out more than a couple of words, like a radio sliding in and out of static. He hears Dennis saying his name, and for two hours he doesn’t sleep at all.

At nine o’clock on the dot, as promised, Old Black Man arrives. He doesn’t say anything to Mac when he enters the bedroom, just lies down at the foot of the bed and starts snoring. Mac counts the rumbling outtakes of breath and visualises sheep. Somewhere between seven-hundred and eight-hundred, he’s out like a light.

Dee’s heavy footfalls rouse him when she comes in. “Bitch,” he mumbles into the pillow.

“Dick,” she shoots back, sliding underneath the blanket she claimed for herself.

“Where’s Dennis?” It comes out in a slur of elongated syllables, drenched in exhaustion.

“He went out,” Dee says shortly. “And no, I don’t know if he’s coming back tonight. Just go back to sleep.”

“’s against the rules.”

“Yeah, I know. Don’t tell Frank, fuckface.”

“Won’t.” He’s already drifting off.

“Sure, Ronnie.”

Too tired to fight, he flips her off and buries his head in his pillow, trying to imagine he’s alone.

*

Dennis doesn’t return until the following afternoon. The first thing Mac notices is that his eyes are swamped by dark circles; Mac’s forced to wonder if he slept at all. He’s irritable on sight, glaring daggers when Mac says, “Good sleep?” – too easy to fall back into the passive-aggressive routine of the last month.

“Mac, shut up,” he says, fingers at his temples.

Mac manages a good few seconds of being silent before he says, voice teetering dangerously on the edge of casual, “Why’d you leave, anyway?”

“Fucking–” Dennis takes a sharp breath in through his nose. “I shouldn’t have to explain myself to you, but if you _must_ know, I wanted one night of freedom before I’m forced to be subjected to your snoring for a year.”

Mac takes a swig of his beer, considering. “But you know I don’t snore s’much anymore, dude. You’re the one who told me I was getting better.”

(In truth, with Dennis on the hammock and Mac underneath, Dennis hadn’t relented until Mac went to a sleep clinic. Mac hadn’t seen the point, really, and it had all seemed like bullshit – but Dennis had paid for it and by the end the level of noise he made in his sleep was deemed acceptable.)

“Yeah, well, you’re still loud,” Dennis gripes. He’s still hovering near the door, vibrating with caffeine-induced energy. “I was just being nice.”

 _Being nice_ and _Dennis_ aren’t concepts Mac usually associates with each other, but he thinks it’s best to let it go. “Are you gonna stand there all day, dude?” he asks, carefully neutral.

Dennis shakes his head like he’s jolting himself out of something and joins Mac on the couch. They sit a careful distance apart, and Mac finishes his beer, and they don’t talk. Mac thinks their friendship, right now, feels like a broken vase that’s being awkwardly glued back together. The places they used to fit feel jagged and fraught. He thinks about Dennis’ wide-open smile when he gave Mac the dog. He thinks about the Dennis next to him, who might be carved out of marble.

*

That night, Mac lies awake until Dennis comes to bed. He’d been left to close the bar, so it’s three am by the time he stumbles in. From the sound of his footsteps, Mac can tell that he’s unsteady from exhaustion, rather than drinking at work again. He wonders – in an absent, sleepy sort of way – about the amount of useless Dennis information he’s got tucked in his brain.

With sleep creeping over him like an inexorable mist, he listens to Dennis in the bathroom, going through the steps of his nightly skincare routine with typically vigorous efficiency. The sound of the toilet flushing blasts through the still, early morning air, and Mac holds his breath, waiting for Dee or Old Black Man to wake up and complain about the noise. They don’t.

“Dennis,” Mac whispers when he hears the padding of Dennis’ bare feet against the carpet.

“Dude, you’re still awake?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what d’you want me to do? Read you a bedtime story?” But Dennis comes around to Mac’s side of the bed, crouching down to look him in the eye.

“Nah, man,” Mac says, fixating on the shadows Dennis’ eyelashes are casting against the moonlit pallor of his skin. He steels himself. “Why’d you tell Dee about when we were…y’know. Doing it.”

Dennis makes a face. “Just call it ‘sex’, Mac, goddamn. And I told her because I got drunk. Happy?”

Mac hums. He doesn’t know what makes him say it, but before he can reconsider, “It was meant to be just our thing.”

“I know, man,” Dennis sighs. He brushes a strand of hair off Mac’s forehead. “Just go to sleep, yeah?” Mac thinks that’s as close to an apology as he’s ever likely to get, so he smiles, mumbling his assent and closing his eyes in a rare display of obedience. Dennis, briefly, pets at his hair before he leaves, going to his side of the bed.

*

It wasn’t a sex dream. Mac thinks it would’ve been better if it had been a sex dream.

They’re three weeks into their new sleeping arrangement and everything’s fine – has become the sort of routine that requires little thought. Only, Dennis is still distant in a way that sits heavy in Mac’s chest. It’s not like the rough patches they’ve been through before, which had burned out too quickly for Mac to dwell on them. It just keeps going, Dennis getting icier and icier and Mac fluttering uselessly around him, close but never close enough to touch.

The dream is almost innocent, when viewed in a certain light. Mac can only remember bits and pieces, but he remembers that they’d been on their Monthly Dinner and Dennis had reached across the table, taken his hand. Like it was a date – which is ridiculous, because the Monthly Dinner isn’t a _date_.

Mac’s dreamt about weirder stuff in the past. He’s had sex dreams of a sort about everyone in the gang, including – unfortunately – Dee and Frank, but none of those dreams have ever twisted him out of shape as much as this one. He’s jittery over breakfast, where Dennis is nibbling at chunks of banana to appease Dee, who’s instituted an Every Day Breakfast Rule. Most days, Dennis actually complies, which Mac guesses is to keep her off his back about the bottle of pills that are collecting dust on the bathroom shelf. Mac stays out of the whole thing out of a lingering sense of self-preservation.

“Okay, boners,” Dee says, draining the last of her coffee, “I’ll see you at the bar. I’ve got–” She pauses as though it’ll build suspense. Mac takes another bite of dry toast. “–a _date_.”

“At ten in the morning.” Dennis has cut one of his slices of banana into ten miniscule chunks. Mac pretends not to see.

“We’re getting brunch,” Dee says, smarmy with it. “They’re loaded.”

“They?” Mac furrows his brow. “Are you, like, attending a brunch orgy?”

There was a time when Dennis would have laughed at that. Now, the ensuing silence serves to emphasise the space where the sound once would have been; Dee seems to be waiting for it, too.

“No, dick,” she says. “They’re non-binary. And just save your freak-out about that for later, okay? I’m running late.” Mac doesn’t think he can expend the energy to freak out about anything else right now; he’s still thinking about the way dream Dennis’ eyes had crinkled at the corners when he’d smiled at Mac. When he looks up, Dee’s putting on her fanciest shoes, so she must really like the person, Mac thinks.

“Bold of you to think we give a shit,” Dennis says. The retort’s too late; everything feels off-kilter. Dee glares and slams the door behind her.

Once she’s gone, silence settles over the apartment like a dust cloud. Mac’s toast tastes remarkably similar to sawdust, but they ran out of peanut butter three days ago and the butter in the refrigerator has mould on it. It was Dennis’ turn to do the groceries; whenever he does them these days he buys a ton of celery and coffee and not much else. Mac used to hate coffee, before he lived with Dennis. Now, he shovels four sugars into every cup he has and drinks it with little more than a wince, like he thinks it will make Dennis proud of him. It’s just like how sometimes he still lets Dennis order salad for him when they go out. Sometimes he thinks that, eventually, he’ll manage to become the kind of person Dennis wants him to be.

“What’s up?” Dennis asks eventually, when Mac’s been silent and jumpy for the better part of ten minutes. He sounds tired, like dealing with Mac’s emotions is a drain on his limited, all-important time. “Normally I can’t get you to _stop_ talking, so what’s the matter with you?”

“You don’t have to be friends with me, you know,” Mac says, and it feels like a constriction on his lungs clamps down as he says the words. “I can let you go.”

Dennis looks taken aback. “What are you talking about?”

“You don’t like me!” Mac feels, absurdly, close to tears, and he’s immensely glad that Dee isn’t here to witness this. He’s not exactly thrilled about Dennis’ presence, but some things can’t be helped. “You say it all the time, and it’s like – fine. You know? You don’t have to, you can just – I don’t know…”

“Mac – Mac, shh, okay?”

Dennis is kneeling next to him, one hand on his shoulder and the other above his diaphragm. Mac doesn’t remember seeing him move.

“You’re having a panic attack,” Dennis says, because he thinks he’s some kind of psychology genius, which he’s _not_. Mac does feel sort of panicky, though. “Just breathe, okay. I’m here. Breathe with me a little bit.”

“I know how to breathe,” Mac mumbles.

“I know you do, baby, just take deep breaths. Move my hand, all right?”

Dennis had called him _baby_ in the dream, Mac remembers. His voice had been soft, like it hardly ever is in reality anymore. Sort of like it is now.

“Good, you’re doing so good.” Dennis’ voice is close to his ear, and the hand that’s not regulating Mac’s breathing has migrated to the back of his neck, rubbing soothing circles there. Mac wonders if one of the things they taught in the psychology classes at Penn State is how to be so close that it’s overwhelming. It’s like every time Mac gets lost inside himself Dennis is suddenly right there, in his space, breathing the same air. “I got you, okay?”

“You don’t have to do this,” Mac says, because it’s important that he does. The words come out a little choked.

“Okay, listen up, asshole, because I’m only gonna say this once.” Dennis sounds more like Dennis again. Mac lets out his first full breath in five minutes. “When I say I hate you, I mean it – at the time. And I can – I’ll try to stop, but. Most of the time I don’t hate you.”

This, from Dennis, counts as a heartfelt declaration. Mac manages a second proper breath.

“You’re my best friend,” Dennis says. The words wash over Mac like a cool balm.

“Den,” he says.

“I know, I know.” For the first time, Mac registers that Dennis sounds a little frantic. It’s not a tone Mac’s ever heard on him before, because normally Dennis either goes loud and scary or low and manipulative when he doesn’t feel in control. Right now, his voice is quiet but it’s shaking. Mac doesn’t know what that means. There’s no precedent. “Just don’t talk, for a bit. Hey, c’mere.”

And Dennis is tilting Mac’s face towards him, hand firm but gentle under his chin. Mac’s next breath shudders on the outtake, although he’s still managing to move Dennis’ right hand, in and out. Dennis’ expression is unreadable as presses his thumb to the moisture underneath Mac’s eyes, wiping it away. “It’s okay,” Dennis is muttering nonsensically. “You’re okay.”

“I’m not crying,” Mac says.

He sees the twitch that means Dennis is trying to stop himself from rolling his eyes. “I know you’re not.” Dennis sighs, pulling back. “I’m gonna get you some water, bro. Go sit on the couch.”

Mac thinks about how Dennis can go from calling him _baby_ to calling him _bro_ in a matter of minutes, and he wonders which one he prefers. He moves numbly to the couch, hating his answer.

When Dennis thrusts a glass of water in his direction, their fingers overlap for a moment. Dennis pulls back like Mac’s hand is coated in acid – so the brief intimacy is gone once again, before Mac even got the chance to savor it. The way Dennis sits next to him is deliberate, leaving no contact between any parts of their bodies. Just the two of them, carefully adjacent.

Dennis used to touch him all the time. During the year when they were having sex, it felt like Dennis’ hands were on him constantly: smoothing down his clothes, directing him wherever Dennis wanted him to go. Mac thinks that Dennis was just nicer to him in general back then. Dennis used to buy him iced coffee before they went into work, the kind with chocolate flavouring and whipped cream, and tell Mac that he looked nice from time to time. He’d still been a dick, because he was _Dennis_ , but then he’d ordered pizza and propped his feet up in Mac’s lap and they’d laughed it off. Back then, he’d even eat a few slices of the pizza before complaining about calorie content and he’d press his greasy fingers against Mac’s cheek and kiss him because he could, because that was something they did. But then they’d broken it off.

Mac’s stomach drops.

“Dennis,” Mac says. “Were we–? Did you think we were–?”

“Get a sentence out,” Dennis snaps. His voice is still a little shaky. “And drink your water.”

Mac obediently sips at it, trying to figure out what he wants to say. “After Charlie’s musical,” he starts, and ignores the way Dennis’ face hardens at the mention of it, “were we dating?”

Dennis’ hands spasm against his thighs. Mac can’t bring himself to look at his face.

“Both people have to know they’re dating for it to be considered dating,” Dennis says, which isn’t really an answer. “Otherwise it’s just like what Charlie has with the Waitress.”

“Yeah, but we were doing – we were having sex.”

“Mac, do we have to talk about this?”

“But we never did!” Mac says, and a little of the water sloshes out onto his hand. In an effort not to get too worked up again, he drinks some more of it. “We never talked about it, except for when…”

“Except for when you ended it.”

Mac looks at Dennis’ face. His skin is red like when he gets angry, although he doesn’t seem angry. Normally when Dennis is angry there’s a lot more yelling.

“You’re the one who said you weren’t flourishing.”

“I didn’t mean – I didn’t want you to leave.”

“You’ve got a hell of a way of showing it.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say!” Dennis retorts, pitch rising alarmingly. “Maybe, yeah, there were a few moments back then when it was fun to pretend you weren’t a repressed _asshole_ and that we could have something, I don’t know, approaching a normal relationship.”

Mac’s first priority whenever Dennis gets like this is to calm him down; he’s experienced varying degrees of success over the years, but the impulse remains as strong as ever. “Sorry,” he says, because taking responsibility is good. Dennis likes people apologising to him – Mac most of all. “I didn’t know.”

“Yeah, well, you’re an idiot.”

Mac sighs, letting the insult wash over him. “You never said,” he mumbles. “It’s like you just expect me to know what’s going on in your head all the time, and maybe it is because I’m dumb or whatever, but. If you don’t say stuff out loud I can’t, like, know it.”

Dennis huffs out a laugh. “There’s nothing I could have said,” he responds, and Mac can hear the way his voice is hardening like it’s water turning into ice, “that would’ve changed your mind.”

Before Mac can respond to that, Dennis has lurched to his feet and stormed out of the apartment. The slam of the door reverberates for a few seconds and Mac lies back, trying to breathe steadily through his nose. He wishes he knew how to stop fucking up with Dennis, but it feels like trying to walk across a field that’s one big landmine. So he just thinks about what he can do to make Dennis happy.

Dennis thinks he can fool Mac with his whole ‘no feelings’ schtick, but Mac remembers when they were twenty years old and Dennis dragged them to see _Titanic_ four times in theaters, and every time he held onto Mac’s forearm and cried at the end. When the lights came up they didn’t mention it. Rinse and repeat. Mac remembers it because it was the first time he saw (heard) Dennis cry, after years of thinking he was the coolest guy in the universe. Since then he’s seen Dennis cry a shit-ton of times, and he’s seen him get angry so often it seems like it’s his default state of being, and sometimes he’s seen Dennis cry _while_ he’s angry – he’s even seen him happy, a few times. He may not understand the diagnosis Dee keeps harping on about, because sometimes she’s even worse than Dennis with the whole psychology thing, but he’s known Dennis long enough that he’s aware Dennis doesn’t feel things the way other people do.

He could ask Dee for advice, or he could pull a move from Dennis’ playbook and secretly get him to take the pills the doctor gave him by crushing them up and putting them in Dennis’ food. This would only work if Dennis actually ate his food, instead of pushing it around his plate and saying he’s not hungry; it also makes Mac feel kind of queasy, and if Dennis found out Mac was secretly drugging him he’d probably flip out, so that’s not an option.

The third thing is to think of someone who doesn’t make Dennis angry all the time, and ask them how they do it. Mac quickly cycles through the options. There’s Maureen, who still comes around to the apartment sometimes in her cat-form. Dennis says he hates her even more than he says he hates Mac, but while she’s round they sequester themselves in the bedroom and Mac doesn’t even know _what_ they do. Ex-wives aside, Mac doesn’t think family members are a realistic option, because Frank forgets Dennis’ name sometimes and Dennis once got plastered and told Mac that Dee hasn’t told him she loves him in ten years. Mac had been all like, “that’s fucked up,” and Charlie had said, “maybe if you want her to not hate you, you shouldn’t treat her like shit,” and for some reason, Dennis had yelled at _Mac_.

That’s it. Charlie.

Charlie picks up his phone on the third ring and just breathes into the microphone for five long seconds.

“Um, Charlie,” Mac says, “you know you’re meant to say _hello_ when you answer the phone, right?”

“Oh, hey, Mac. What can I do you for?”

“Right. Hi. Um, so.” Mac pauses, trying to think of the right way to put it. “Why doesn’t Dennis hate you?”

“Bro, Dennis hates everyone,” Charlie says. “I wouldn’t take it too personal.”

“He doesn’t hate you,” Mac insists.

“We don’t really spend that much time together, just us.” Charlie sounds reluctant. “And, no offence, dude, but he’s needy as shit, so I wouldn’t want to spend as much time with him as you do.”

“I _know_ he’s needy,” Mac says. “But he never says he hates you, and he’s barely even mean to you most of the time, so I need you to tell me what you’re doing.”

“Okay, well, you’re not gonna want to hear it like this, but,” Charlie says, “I don’t care whether he hates me or not. Not like you do.”

“What?”

“Dude, you’re just like, so desperate for Dennis to lo – like you. And you need him to tell you constantly, with words and stuff, but he’s all emotionally weird and you’re both bad at talking to each other.”

“Me and Dennis talk all the time!” Mac bursts out, although that hasn’t been entirely true for a while. Mac talks _at_ Dennis all the time.

“Not about the real stuff!” Charlie responds. “Look, Dennis is like those sharks on the nature channel, right? He smells the blood, which is you wanting his, uh, approval, and he rips your face off with his teeth. Get it?”

“Um.”

“The more he says he hates you, the more you want to please him, right?”

“Charlie, are you high right now?”

“No more’n usual. That’s not the point.”

“Okay,” Mac says slowly. “So I should…?”

“Get your head out of your ass,” Charlie mutters. “Listen, bro, I don’t know Dennis like you do. He comes over and we get high sometimes, but we don’t have check-in texts or monthly dinner dates, so that’s all on you.”

“They’re not _dates_ ,” Mac says.

“Hey, remember when Dennis sang to you that one time?” Charlie says, and then he hangs up. Mac stares at the phone in his hand for a long moment, trying to figure out what the hell that conversation was about.

*

Dennis doesn’t come into the bar at all that day. Dee turns up late, flushed and happy from her date, and Charlie is close behind her, covered head to toe in grime.

“Have either of you seen Dennis?” he asks.

“Why, hello to you, too, Mac. My morning was great, and how was yours?” Dee says snidely.

“He was meant to open the bar,” Mac continues. “But when I got here it was empty and I had to use the dumpster key to get in.”

“The dumpster key?” Dee says.

“The spare key we keep in the dumpster!” Charlie says. “How do you not know about this?”

“We shouldn’t be keeping a _spare key_ in the _dumpster_ , Charlie! We’ve been robbed before! And bums are always rooting around in our garbage. Oh god _damn,_ you guys.”

“We obviously need it, Dee, for the days when Dennis can’t be bothered to turn up and open the bar.”

“Well, why hasn’t he texted you? I thought you guys had that, you know, check-in system?”

“He reserves the right to not reply when he thinks I’m being irritating,” Mac says, echoing Dennis’ words from after the whole debacle with Mac calling the police and moving out. “Or when we’re fighting.”

“Oh, you two had a fight?” Dee’s voice goes all mocking and simpering. “How are you holding up? Are you gonna go write in your diary about it?”

“Shut up, bitch,” Mac says, but it’s got none of usual fire behind it. He goes back to nursing his beer – his second of the morning. Whatever, it’s not like anyone was there to stop him.

“Oh my god, you’re gonna be whining about this all day, aren’t you?” Dee helps herself to a bottle of her own. “Do you want me to call him? Since you’re not man enough.”

“I am so! He just...wouldn’t pick up, so there’s no point,” Mac says, and it’s mostly true. On a good day, there’s only a seventy-five per cent chance Dennis will pick up the phone when Mac calls him. On a bad day, that number jumps off a cliff. But it’s also that while he was rooting around in the dumpster for the key, Mac thought about trying anyway – maybe leaving a pissy voicemail – and his heart had leapt up into his throat, choking him. His brain flashed back to Dennis implying that he’d wanted a real relationship between them and it felt like there were pins and needles all over his skin. “You can call him,” he says. It doesn’t sound as dismissive as he wants it to.

“I’m gonna...go bash some rats,” Charlie announces awkwardly, backing out of the room.

Dee glares at his retreating form. “What’s up with him?”

“Is Frank meant to be coming in today?”

“Oh, do you think he and Charlie had a fight?” There’s a gleam in Dee’s eyes that arises every time she thinks there’s some good gossip amongst the gang.

“No, Dee, not everyone’s fighting! Just checking how short-staffed we’re gonna be today.”

Dee rolls her eyes. “Fine, dickbag, I’m calling Dennis.” She turns away from him with her phone to her ear.

“Put it on speaker.”

“Shh!” Dee hisses. “Oh, hi, Dennis. Just wondering whether you wanted to do your job at any point today?” The response is too faint for Mac to make out. He feels like he’s vibrating in his seat. “Yeah, no, that’s not actually a reason you get to take a personal day. Illness, death of a family member, imprisonment, those count. You don’t get to just hide out from your – Okay. Where are you, anyway?” She turns round again, so Mac sees the way her eyebrows shoot up her forehead. “You staying there overnight? Yeah, well, of course not, but. I’ll tell him if I damn well please, Dennis. Oh, you asshole!” Mac can tell he’s hung up on her even before she flings the phone, frustrated, onto the counter.

“What was that?”

“He’s hiding at Charlie’s, that’s where Frank is.”

Mac quickly runs through the list of things Dennis could be doing with Frank. It goes: banging whores, doing drugs, stealing, or something with that god-awful toe knife. None of these are things Mac is particularly thrilled about.  

“He told me not to tell you,” Dee continues. “And he’s holding my favorite mascara ransom, so one: leave him alone, and two: you owe me.”

“What’s he doing there?”

“You know, just because we’re twins doesn’t mean we have some freaky mental link. I don’t know what he’s doing, and frankly I don’t give a fuck. You’re the last one who spoke to him, anyway. What did you do to piss him off?”

“None of your business. Bird.”

She looks at him in a way that makes him feel two inches tall. “That plays even worse when Dennis isn’t here to back you up,” she says, and the worst part is he _knows_. Missing Dennis like missing a limb. A limb that scratches you sometimes, but all the same.

*

“Since he’s not coming back tonight, I’m taking the left,” Dee says at midnight.

“We don’t know he’s not coming back,” Mac responds, staring at the sleeping form of Old Black Man. “I mean, it’s not like he’d choose sharing with Frank and Charlie over us. Not after the poop incident.”

“He’s might have wrangled a hotel room out of Frank’s wallet,” Dee says. It’s a perfectly reasonable suggestion, and Mac hates her for it.

“I hate sharing with you when Dennis isn’t here. Feels all couple-y and shit.”

“Mac, I would rather claw my eyeballs out and eat them than lay a finger on you. Besides, Dennis would murder me.”

“Why would Dennis murder you?”

“Oh my _god_. Just get in the fucking bed.”

*

This time it is a sex dream. It’s more of a memory than a dream, though, of the last time before they stopped doing it. They’d woken up together, that Tuesday morning. Dennis had been half on top of him, because he was a restless sleeper, and Mac’s hand was splayed over his stomach, under the t-shirt that was too big for him, with a slogan over the chest. Dennis said he hated Mac’s clothes when Mac wore them, and then never hesitated to steal them to sleep in, back then.

Under his hand, Mac could feel Dennis’ slow, deep breathing. He could smell his girly shampoo. He was thinking about how they’d watch _Predator_ later, and how Dennis might blow him halfway through like he’d done last week: instructing Mac to keep his eyes on the screen until he came and then crawling into his lap afterwards, rubbing against him until Mac relented and finger-fucked him through the closing credits. That was a top five _Predator_ Tuesday, Mac thought. The memory was doing nothing to flag his morning wood, which was crushed somewhere underneath Dennis’ spine. The nice thing to do, he knew, would be to stealthily get out of bed and let Dennis sleep while he took care of it in the shower, but Mac wasn’t really one for being nice.

He ran his hand up Dennis’ torso, catching a nail on his nipple and shifting downwards to kiss his jaw.

“Kiss me on the mouth with your morning breath and I’ll cut off your balls,” Dennis said. His voice was gruff, only half awake. Mac smiled into his neck.

“Morning.”

“Mm.” Dennis was stretching out languidly, bones cracking. He was still mostly on top of Mac, who received an elbow in the face for his troubles.

“One of these days you’re going to break my nose,” he said, catching Dennis’ wrist and relocating it to a safer location. “And not in a fun way.”

“There’d be a fun way for me to break your nose?”

“I dunno,” Mac replied. “Okay, princess, get off me so I can brush my teeth for your highness.”

“Get me some mouthwash while you’re up.”

“I actually don’t give a shit about your morning breath.”

“That’s because you’re disgusting,” Dennis said.

By the time he got back from the bathroom, Dennis was naked and playing absently with one of his nipples, eyes closed and head tipped back. Mac couldn’t resist when he was like that, clambering onto the bed to suck on Dennis’ neck. “You can’t even wait three minutes?” he murmured, running his thumb over the stubble on Dennis’ chin. He kept trying to convince Dennis to let his facial hair grow out a little bit, but so far all he got was the roughness of the mornings they spent together, before he was let loose with the shaver and moisturiser and foundation.

“Play with them for me,” Dennis answered, looking pointedly at the long fingers that were still pinching at his nipple.

The thing about Dennis was that he was insanely sensitive just about everywhere. There were points on his neck that could make him just about convulse, and his nipples were endlessly fascinating to Mac. “Say please,” he said, splaying his hand on Dennis’ ribcage.

“You’re a piece of shit,” Dennis replied. “Please.”

Mac smiled, pecked him on the mouth and slithered down to replace Dennis’ fingers with his teeth. Dennis immediately tried to arch into the contact, writhing against Mac’s hands on his hips.

“D’you think you could come from someone touching your nips?” Mac asked, careful not to say _me_.

“I don’t know,” Dennis bit out. “You’re the only person I’ve ever been with who loves them this much. _Fuck_. Bite – yeah, just like that. Oh, good boy.”

Mac smiled with the praise, letting Dennis’ hand thread through his hair. He was always so controlling until the exact moment when he wasn’t, when he went too far to do anything except take what Mac would give him.

“What do you want?” he asked, propping his chin on Dennis’ sternum.

Dennis rose onto his elbows to look down at him. His chest was heaving already, scarlet bite marks all over his right pec. His hair was in its usual morning birds’ nest and he was starting to sweat. Mac thought, quite accidentally, that he’d never seen something so beautiful.

“Can you just – touch me?” Dennis asked. It was quiet, quieter than he usually asked for things in the bedroom.

“Like, touch your–?”

Dennis was shaking his head. “No. Just wanna, like, feel your hands on me.”

“Okay, sure.”

“Kiss me first,” Dennis said, keeping a hand on the back of Mac’s neck to stop him from pulling away, as though Mac would ever think of pulling away.

It was always unbelievable to him that, after years of Dennis’ insistence that kissing was just about the most boring thing you could do with another person, he seemed to enjoy kissing Mac. There were some days when Dennis didn’t like being touched in a sexual way at all, which had taken Mac a while to understand – instead, he’d just nestle on top of Mac like a particularly needy cat, swapping slow, lazy kisses with him for hours.

Mac loved it. It was one of the things that made him feel special, like he could be better for Dennis than all the girls in those sex tapes.

He brushed his thumb over Dennis’ lower lip before he leaned in, taking his time with it. He pressed Dennis down when he arched up, running his hands over every part of skin he could reach. The noises Dennis was sighing into his mouth were irresistible, and Mac couldn’t help but pull back to say, just, “Dennis,” like the two syllables could communicate everything he felt in that moment: “Dennis.”

*

“Good dream?”

Later in life, when all this is a funny story, Mac will say that he let out a manly shout in response to the words and the entire glass of water being dumped onto his face. In reality, it might be closer to a screech.

“What the fuck, Dee!”

“Dude, you were, like, humping the mattress and moaning my twin brother’s name. It’s gonna take months of therapy for me to deal with this shit,” Dee says, deadpan.

Mac shakes out his sopping wet hair. “You just wanted an excuse to throw water at me, you bitch.”

“No, seriously, I woke up and you were all like _Dennis, oh, Dennis_ , and I wanted to pour bleach into my own eyeballs and ears, but then I decided that rudely awakening you from your gross sex dream would be _way_ more satisfying. And it was!”

“It was not _gross_.”

“Oh, I’m sure there were fucking rose petals and candles, because those are Dennis’ favorite things in the world,” Dee says. “Get up, it’s eleven already.”

“So?”

“ _So_ , we have a semi-functioning business, you lazy sack of shit. Get ready for it.”

*

In retrospect, it seems ridiculous that he hadn’t realised Dennis’ feelings for him were…whatever Dennis’ feelings for him were. He’s still not sure. He’s always been so attuned to Dennis’ mercurial nature and, long ago, he learned how to figure out what a raised eyebrow or curled lip meant, how to respond to it. With that in consideration, it seems impossible that he could’ve missed something as monumental as Dennis having feelings for him.

It’s like every time he thinks he’s got Dennis figured out, everything unravels and he’s forced to start again from scratch.

The horrible thing about the dream – the memory – is that it’s reminded him of how easy it was. The transition from friendship to whatever they’d been had felt natural, somehow inevitable. That first night, sleeping in Dennis’ bed, there’d been a panicked feeling crawling up his throat – that he’d fucked it all up, that Dennis would kick him out and never speak to him again when the morning after was awkward.

The morning after hadn’t been awkward. Dennis had woken him up by insistently poking him in the cheek, and then he’d said, “You kicked me – and this is a conservative estimate here, dude – seven-thousand times last night. Go make me breakfast.” Mac had made him breakfast.

Looking back, the year that had followed seems like a blur. They’d spent practically every waking minute together; Mac had spent five nights out of seven in Dennis’ bed (the kicking thing had continued to be a small issue, and Dennis insisted on getting Wednesdays and Fridays off).

And yet the break-up, when it came, had felt just as inevitable. Dennis pulling away – Mac could’ve seen that coming a mile off. What he couldn’t have predicted was Dennis wanting to take him back.

After the dinner Dee had orchestrated to get them to talk, Dennis had reached out in the cab, an uncharacteristically hesitant hand coming to rest on Mac’s thigh. And Mac had pulled away.

They didn’t really fight about it; neither of them yelled, and there wasn’t any violence. There was just Mac saying, “I don’t know, dude, it was getting kinda gay. Didn’t you like it better when we were just bros?” They both knew he was lying, or at least skirting around the truth, but Dennis just said, “If that’s what you want,” and went to bed early.

Back in the present, Mac stares at his own reflection and says, “Oh. Fuck.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> will be updated,,, at some point!! would love to be more specific but i started writing this in june so don't get your hopes up. if you are desparate for an update, feel free to yell at me and i will do my best to please you. if you aren't desparate for an update, that's also valid


	2. warning signs i've completely ignored

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as with any canon divergence fic, you may be wondering where exactly the canon diverged. here's the answer: dennis, in 1994, went to watch interview with the vampire in theaters. he realised he was attracted to men there and then.

Dennis completely drops off the grid for the next week. It’s inconvenient as hell, because Mac has never been more desperate to talk to him. He keeps reciting speeches in his mind – even gets to the point of trying to write one down, but it ends up sounding stilted and over-rehearsed, so he screws up the piece of paper and throws it as hard as he can at the wall. It flops to the ground without much force, just another in a long line of disappointments.

“You’re going through the five stages of grief,” Dee says, sagely.

Mac stares at her blankly; he hadn’t heard her come in to the bedroom. “Dennis isn’t dead.”

“Yeah, but you knew who I was talking about.” She taps the side of her nose. Mac wants to throttle her; he settles for taking deep breaths in through his nose and out through his mouth, like Dennis taught him to do whenever he isn’t around to calm Mac down. 

“See, you’re at anger right now.”

“And that’s, what, the fourth stage?”

“No, idiot,” Dee says. “I think it’s the third. It doesn’t matter. The point is, we need to get you to acceptance that Dennis is gone.”

“He’s not gone forever, though.”

“That’s denial.”

“I thought I was at anger,” Mac says.

“You can be at both stages at once.”

“That doesn’t sound right…”

“I think a vital part of your journey to acceptance is to start sleeping on the floor,” Dee says, “and not tell Frank about it, okay?”

Mac looks around for something to throw at her. It turns out he’d exhausted his options with the paper, so he settles for glaring. “I’m not gonna sleep on the floor, you bitch.”

“Why not? It’s what you were doing before.”

It hadn’t been so bad, really – Mac had liked falling asleep to the sound of Dennis’ breathing from the hammock above. But things are different now.

“Look, why don’t _you_ sleep on the floor?”

“I – this is _my apartment_!” Dee screeches. “You and your boyfriend have been living here _rent-free_ for over two years! You—”

“Dennis is _not_ my boyfriend.”

“Then stop pining over him!” Dee snarls. “I swear, you two dipshits are the reason I’ve gone half gray already. You’ve been doing this _goddamn dance_ for two decades, and you really think me and Charlie don’t see it. Christ, even Frank’s noticed!”

“You’ve gone gray?”

“ _Half_ -gray, asshole.” Dee runs a hand through her hair self-consciously.

“Wait, are you even naturally blonde?” Mac asks. “Because I always wondered why, like, you and Dennis are twins, but your hair’s yellow and his is sort of caramel chocolatey?”

Dee just stares at him for ten long, silent seconds. “Did you also wonder why I’m a girl and he’s a boy?”

“I used to, but then I remembered the Bible.”

“You remembered the Bible.”

“Yeah, like how Eve was made from Adam’s rib? So I reckon you could be made from one of Dennis’ ribs. That doesn’t explain the blonde hair thing, though.”

Without another word, Dee turns and leaves the room.

*

Because he’s a responsible adult, he puts on a mostly clean shirt and goes to work. Charlie and Frank have been holding down the fort for the Saturday afternoon crowd (usually it’s just the same two old alcoholics, one of whom has no teeth); Dee’s off on another date with her mystery-person, who she adamantly refuses to let anyone in the gang meet, no matter how much they all tell her they don’t care.

As soon as he gets behind the bar, Mac pours himself two shots of whiskey and downs them in quick succession.

“Dennis still not back?” Charlie surmises. He smells faintly like a bizarre mix of cotton candy and lighter fluid, which Mac decides not to inquire about.

“He always does this!” he says instead. “He – leaves, or he throws me out, or he doesn’t speak to me. I’m so sick of it! I’m sick of him.”

“Maybe one day he’ll leave Philly for good.”

Mac freezes. “Why would you say that?”

“I mean, he always says he wants to go become an animal doctor or the serial killer from _Silence of the Lambs_ or whatever, so maybe he’s gone to follow his dreams. Have there been any murders in the news?”

“Dennis wouldn’t kill anyone,” Mac sighs. “He’d just avoid them until they dropped dead out sheer goddamn exhaustion. And he wouldn’t leave Philly, either.”

“Why not?”

 _Because I’m in Philly_. “His whole life’s here. Plus, he needs Frank’s money.”

“Hey, I haven’t been giving him shit,” Frank says. He’s sat with his face pressed down against the surface of the bar; Mac had assumed he was sleeping, or maybe dead.

“Well, then where the fuck is he?” Mac asks. “Are you sure he hasn’t stolen your credit card or something?”

“Frank’s stopped with credit cards,” Charlie says, biting at his thumbnail. “He only carries cash now, and we would’ve noticed if some of that was gone. Are you sure Dennis didn’t have enough money of his own to…?”

“Dude, Dennis works at the same place we do. When have we ever had enough cash to disappear like that?”

“I dunno, maybe when we were a gay bar for, like, a week?”

“That was more than ten years ago, Charlie,” Mac sighs. “So unless he held on to that money for over a decade, can I get a reasonable suggestion?”

“Second job,” Frank grunts. “Maybe he’s still a whore.”

“And that was nine years ago! Fuck, why are we so stuck in the past?”

He starts to pour himself another shot, but Charlie stills his hand. “Getting drunk over him isn’t gonna solve anything,” he says. “Just have a beer, calm down.”

“I can’t – look, it’s my fault, sort of, that he’s – and I just –”

“Look, man, if you gotta take a day off –”

“I don’t,” Mac says, too quickly. “It’s not like he’s dead. Why does everyone keep making it like he’s dead?”

Charlie exhales slowly. “Okay, here’s what I think happened. He found some chick he DENNIS’d and he’s staying with her until whatever’s going on with him is over, right? So there’s no use in freaking out over it.”

It makes sense, Mac is willing to admit. Dennis doesn’t like staying with women after he sleeps with them, to the point where he’s called Mac a few times in the early hours of the morning to help him leave through a window (because the front door would make too much noise, and he doesn’t want to have a ‘talk’), but desperate times. If Dennis thinks he’s avoiding a ‘talk’ with _Mac_ , he might be willing to stay with the chick for months, even.

“That’s shit,” he says.

“Hey, at least he’s probably not dead in a ditch somewhere.”

“Great. Thanks, Charlie.”

*

Dennis’ sex tapes were all destroyed in the fire, and as far as Mac knows he’s not been making any more since they moved into Dee’s – so there’s no way for Mac to figure out who Dennis has been sleeping with recently. He does call Maureen (or Bastet) but she just meows at him for a few minutes until finally he hangs up in frustration. He tries the Waitress after that, getting her number from one of Charlie’s stalking logs, but she laughs and says, “Jesus, are you really that co-dependent?” so he hangs up on her, too.

It’s two pm on Sunday, and he’s bored. Normally, he and Dennis would be doing something like drinking in a park, or drinking at home, or drinking at the bar, but without him it just seems pathetic. He’s already been to the gym, and gotten himself off in the shower, and now he’s just staring at the beauty products Dennis left behind, all the anti-ageing skin creams and cologne bottles and fancy, pale foundation. Thinking about it, all this stuff does seem pretty expensive. He glances over at Dee’s (significantly smaller) pile. Dennis’ moisturizer has cursive gold lettering on it; Dee’s is from Trader Joe’s.

He pads out into the living room, towel secure around his waist.

“Are you sure he hasn’t called you?” he asks Dee, who’s got her foot propped up on the couch, painting her toenails a garish shade of orange. At the sound of his voice, she starts and knocks over the bottle, swearing herself bloody at the blot of tangerine it leaves on her precious sofa.

“You’re such an asshole,” she hisses, without making any move to actually clear it up. “This is a limited-edition color, you know.”

“Yeah, I don’t give a shit. Has Dennis called you?”

“You know what, maybe I wouldn’t tell you if he did. Maybe he’s been calling me every single day, but we’re both so fucking _irritated_ by you that we’re keeping it to ourselves.”

“But he hates you,” Mac says.

“No, it’s – look, you’re on only child. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Still doesn’t mean he’s called you.”

An indecipherable look passes over Dee’s face – it’s sort of like the Dennis-expression that Mac knows means he’s trying not to think about something. “Just go put some goddamn clothes on,” she says eventually. “Dickhead.”

*

By the following Friday, things have all but gone to shit.

“Maybe we should start looking for a new bartender,” Charlie suggests, innocently enough. He’s stood on a barstool in the middle of the room, trying to fix the light. Mac has a sudden vision of kicking it out from under him, watching him fall. He blinks, trying to dispel it.

Dee speaks before he does. “Why the _fuck_ would we do that, Charlie.” Her voice is low, dangerous – Mac isn’t even the target and he still takes a step back.

Charlies barrels on, unconcerned. “None of us actually knows how to make cocktails, and I just think that since it was Dennis’ job we should probably find someone to fill in while he’s gone.”

“We’re not replacing Dennis,” Dee says, flat.

“Charlie’s right,” Frank calls from the office. “Yesterday a dude ordered a Cosmopolitan and Mac gave him directions to the Rainbow.”

“It’s what Dennis would have done,” Mac mutters.

“Nah, Dennis would’ve just flirted with him and made him the drink, bro,” Charlie says.

“What do you – Dennis wouldn’t – he’s straight!”

“Uh, sure, whatever, but he always gets the best tips from gay guys.” Charlie pauses, sticking his tongue out as he twists the lightbulb back into place. “And lesbians, actually. Or women with short hair who wear flannel. I don’t think you’re meant to assume.”

“He’s flirting with lesbians?” Dee says. “That’s a whole new level of gross, even for him.”

“Nah, they just seem to like him. How have you guys not noticed this?”

“I don’t know, Charlie, maybe we’re doing our _jobs_ ,” Mac says, just a split second too quickly to remember that he’s the one sat drinking a beer while Charlie tries to fix the light. “And we don’t spend our entire day just watching Dennis.”

Charlie snorts, and Dee stifles a noise under her hand.

“What?”

“Just, you know,” Charlie says, “coming from _you_ , of all people.”

Mac doesn’t even want to know what that means. “Whatever. So Dee can learn how to make a Cosmo, and we don’t have to replace Dennis. Problem solved.”

“Wait, shouldn’t we all learn?” Dee says.

“I don’t know, it just seems kind of girly,” Mac says. “Although I guess if Dennis does it…”

*

“Dude, that’s, like, ninety per cent lime juice in there right now.” Charlie’s breathing over his shoulder, staring at the concoction in the bar’s lonesome cocktail shaker. It is, admittedly, rather green.

“Like you could do any better,” Mac mutters, free-pouring another shot of vodka into a mixture. “How do I make it more redder?”

“Add more cranberry juice, dipshit,” Dee says.

“You’re the one who watched all that _Sex and the City_ shit, Dee, you do it!”

“There are one million goddamn YouTube tutorials on how to do it, you’re just a dumbass.”

“Maybe I should just call Dennis and ask,” Charlie says.

“Yeah, that’d be great, Charlie, if Dennis was _answering his cunting phone_ ,” Mac growls, ripping open the cranberry juice with more force than is strictly necessary.

“Right, so about that…” Charlie says. “Promise not to get mad.”

“Charlie.”

“Look, it’s not a big thing! He just called me a couple days ago, asked me how the bar was doing,” Charlie says in a rush. “And he said he didn’t want to talk to Mac, or Dee particularly, and definitely not Frank, so I just let him know that we were doing okay but that we’d like him back and he said, _I don’t know, Charlie_ , and then he hung up, but I think he’d answer if I called to ask about the cocktail thing.”

“I fucking hate you sometimes, you know that?” Mac sighs. He doesn’t have the energy to get properly angry – these days it just feels like his rage is on a low simmer, unpleasantly incessant. “We’re best friends, how could you not tell me?”

“Dennis is my best friend, too. I know you think you’ve got some kind of claim on him, but you don’t.”

“That’s bullshit. You told me, you barely even care about him,” Mac mutters. He grabs a straw from below the bar and sticks it into the sorry excuse for a Cosmo, wincing when the taste hits his tongue.

“I said I don’t care about him the way you do, bro,” Charlie shrugs. “And, uh, I think you’re meant to throw it around a bit first. Like in that Tom Cruise movie, with the cocktails.”

“You mean _Cocktail_?”

“Yeah,” Charlie says. “Dennis showed it to me, like, a couple weeks ago, and I thought it was sort of lame but he was _really_ into it. All the bartending parts were really cool, though. We should try doing it like that.”

“A couple weeks ago?” Mac asks.

“Yeah, it was a really slow Tuesday so we just closed the bar early and – Dee, what are you doing?”

Mac whips around to look at Dee, who’s scratching at her neck with a look of forced nonchalance plastered over her face. She says, after an awkward pause, “Look, it’s not like he took Charlie on a Monthly Dinner. It’s just one movie night.”

“He hasn’t wanted to do a movie night with me in months,” Mac says, toneless.

Charlie winces apologetically. “I forgot that was one of your things.”

“Not your fault, buddy,” Mac says. He takes another couple gulps of the drink, which works better when he avoids tasting it. “Yeah, we definitely shouldn’t be selling this.”

*

“Hey, you know that private investigator you let me borrow…”

“No,” Frank grunts, shoving another handful of pistachios into his face. He’s spraying crumbs everywhere; Mac would rather be anywhere else but Frank and Charlie’s hellhole of an apartment, right now. But it’s been three weeks since the day of Dennis’ disappearance, and he’s getting increasingly desperate.

“What do you mean, _no_? When me and Dennis were in the suburbs you let me use your PI so I could catch him eating at Applebee’s and shit. I need to use him again.”

“I’m not letting you stalk Dennis anymore,” Frank says.

“It’s not to stalk him! I just need to know where he is.” Mac scans the room for a clean place to sit. He settles, reluctantly, on the arm of the couch. “Don’t you care that he’s disappeared? He’s your son.”

“He’s my whore wife’s son.”

“You raised him, though, doesn’t that count?”

Frank pauses to consider. “No. I was barely there when he was a kid. And he turned out to be a dick.”

“Yeah, and I’m sure those two things aren’t related at _all_. Just let me use your PI, dude – I’ll pay you.”

“How much?”

Mac currently has $237 to his name. “I can give you two-hundred,” he says.

“No deal.”

Mac tries to think about how Dennis would manipulate Frank into giving him what he wanted. It occurs to him that Dennis doesn’t often manage to manipulate Frank at all, so he settles on, “Please.”

Predictably, it doesn’t work.

*

He finds Charlie in the alley outside, surrounded by a ring of cats.

“This is pretty weird, dude,” he says.

Charlie blinks up at him. “All a matter of perspective.”

“Right, sure. I need you to use your creepy thing with Frank to get him to do me a favor. It’s important.”

“I’m not gonna help you stalk Dennis.”

“Why does everyone–? I’m not trying to stalk him, I’m just trying to find out where he is,” he says. “You can’t tell me you’re not worried about him, at this point. Unless he’s called you again?”

“Maybe it’d help if you told us why he left,” Charlie suggests, for at least the sixth time. “Because to me it seems like he’s just taking a long vacation.”

“He’s _not_.”

Charlie sighs. “I’ll talk to Frank, but I want you to realize you’re being insane.”

One of the cats, a tabby, nips at Mac’s ankle as though in support of Charlie’s statement. Its fur is matted behind one ear, and its eyes are a violent, mucus-colored yellow. It says a lot about Mac’s life right now that a small, snarling cat makes him think of Dennis Reynolds.

*

Dennis’ absence has given Mac an unfortunate amount of time for introspection. He hangs out with Charlie as often as possible to stave off the thoughts, and even tries spending the evenings with Dee, who vacillates between treating him with condescending sympathy and unbridled irritation. Despite his best efforts, he’s still alone far more often than he’s used to. He tries not to think about it like he was one part of a whole, the _MacandDennis_ unit, because that’s too depressing.

He starts wearing Dennis’ cologne, and he tells Dee it’s out of spite because the shit’s expensive, but in all honesty he just finds the scent reassuring. A couple of days later, he runs out of shampoo and just grabs Dennis’ citrus-y stuff instead.

After, when he goes into the kitchen to grab a protein bar, Dee glares at him and says, “Smelling like him isn’t going to bring him back, dickhole.”

Mac glares back. “Neither’s sleeping in the middle of the bed. He’s not gonna materialize in the foot of space between you and your side.”

He’s taken aback by the tears that spring to her eyes, too taken aback to respond. “I’m gonna stay at Thea’s tonight,” she says, which is how Mac finds out the name of the person she’s dating. “Knock yourself out wanking over Dennis’ sock drawer.”

She slams the door behind her, and in the space between that and the end of the reverberations, Mac finds himself crying, silent and shaking with it. He hasn’t cried since Dennis left – he’s been too busy feeling desperate, and empty, and angry at everything. He swipes helplessly at his eyes like he can stave off the tears through sheer force of will, but all that happens is his nose starts running, too. He feels childish and ridiculous, stood in the middle of the apartment taking shuddering, gasping breaths – and sniffling, even more humiliatingly.

It takes the better part of ten minutes to calm himself down. He manages to curl up onto the couch, leaving patches of salt-water and snot on the fabric from lying on his side.

Even once he’s stopped crying, it takes a good few minutes for him to move. Mostly, he’s thinking _fuck you_ about Dennis for leaving, about Frank for not letting him stalk Dennis, about Charlie for managing to be someone Dennis could like, and about Dee for making him feel like this with one pointed comment. _Fuck you_ is the antidote to crying, he thinks, and rolls onto his back.

There’s this control that Dennis has over him – that Dennis has always had over him, since the first time they met and Dennis had seemed like a force of nature in and of himself. He hates it, because most of the time it doesn’t seem reciprocal at all. Most of the time, it feels like Dennis is toying with his emotions for fun, just because he can.

And it’s hard to understand that in the light of, _Maybe, yeah, there were a few moments back then when it was fun to pretend you weren’t a repressed asshole and that we could have something, I don’t know, approaching a normal relationship_. Mac hasn’t been able to stop turning those words over in his mind, trying to make them fit with the Dennis who is cold and the Dennis who hates – or, at least, strongly dislikes – him and the Dennis who could leave him, callously and without a second thought. They don’t fit, but things with Dennis very rarely do.

With a lump in his throat, he imagines a world where he was gay and in a real, normal relationship with Dennis – a world where they started dating just out of high school, maybe, and celebrated the supreme court decision on equal marriage with a kiss and a bottle of champagne, instead of arguing about whether it was God’s plan. Maybe Mac would’ve proposed, at the end of one of their Monthly Dinners (they would’ve still had Monthly Dinners, he’s sure) and Dennis might have smiled and pulled out a ring of his own, saying, _guess you beat me to the punch_. And – they –

But Mac isn’t gay. He _isn’t_. There had been that thing with Dennis, but it had been a moment (a year) of weakness, and nowadays he barely even thinks of Dennis in a sexual way. Because he’s straight, and that would be weird.

He thinks about kissing Dennis, a lot, but that’s – Dennis is an insanely good kisser, and even though it’s been more than six years since the last time, Mac can’t help but remember.

And Dennis isn’t gay either. Dennis bangs tons of chicks, even if he never seems to actually like any of them – there’s no way a gay man could have sex with that many women, Mac thinks. If anything, it’s just that God was testing them, and maybe they’re stronger for having given in to temptation and then coming out the other side.

None of which explains why Dennis left.

*

Mac wakes up an hour later, groggy and blinking against the darkness that’s descended over the apartment. He’s squashed up on the couch, face still pressed into the fading remnants of his breakdown, mouth dry and stomach empty. He feels like shit, the way he always does after falling asleep before midnight.

“Goddammit,” he says to the resounding silence of an empty apartment.

There’s got to be a way, he thinks, to break Dennis’ hold on him. There’s got to be a way to make it stop feeling like a punch in the gut every time Dennis throws him out on a whim, or calls him fat, or stands just slightly too close, pulling Mac back into his orbit.

So maybe he didn’t get it all out of his system back then. Stronger men than him have failed – Dennis once told him that Alexander the Great had sex with men, and he was the strongest man in Rome or whatever. Maybe the only way to get over Dennis is to act on those urges with someone else. He does imagine it, sometimes – having sex with men who aren’t Dennis. He’s had a fair few fantasies about Rex, and about various buff celebrities, and one time he imagined banging Cricket and had to take a forty-five minute shower.

And he totally _could_ , too: there are tons of men who’d want to get banged by him. It’s just a case of finding them.

*

He ends up stood in front of his mirror at eleven pm, with his mesh shirt and a pair of Dennis’ tight jeans on. He’s debating which shoes to wear, because he and Dennis aren’t the same size so he can’t steal any of the ones he left behind, and none of his scream _gay club_. They’re mostly boots, which are good for ass-kicking.

Dee’s laptop is open to a Google search for ‘gay club philadelphia’; he’s settled on the Rainbow, which is close enough that he can walk and does $1 shots on Thursdays.

He rakes a hand through his hair, breaking up the mess that the gel and his nap had left. It feels like there should be some other element to his outfit, like glitter or makeup or something gay enough that he can fit in, but he also doesn’t want to look like he’s trying too hard. He grabs a tube of Dennis’ eyeliner from the basket on the dresser, turning it over in his hands. Dennis had always snapped at him whenever he called it ‘guyliner’; it was one of their recurring arguments that felt almost comforting in its familiarity.

But he’s trying not to think about Dennis.

He uncaps the tube and tries to draw a line all the way around his eye. It’s harder than Dee and Dennis make it look, he quickly realizes, sticking out a tongue in concentration. He can’t get the nib close enough to his lashes. He manages a ring of black around the vague area he wants it to be, and uses his index finger to smudge it into place. What he ends up with is messy, but he thinks he sort of likes it. It’s nothing like the elegant cat-eye Dennis is capable of (he never wears it outside, but sometimes he follows a YouTube makeup tutorial on a lazy weekend and gets Mac to take pictures of him), and he’d probably say that Mac looks like a raccoon, but –

“Stop thinking about him,” he tells his reflection, sternly.

*

It’s colder than he’d anticipated outside, being early March and pitch black. A jacket would’ve screwed up the outfit, though, and he wasn’t planning on spending this long outside, staring up at the flickering neon haze of the Rainbow’s sign.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come in now?” the bouncer says. “It’s free entry before midnight.”

“Don’t rush me,” Mac snaps.

The bouncer shrugs. “It’s whatever, man. Nice shirt.”

Mac takes a deep breath in through his nose, holds it for three, releases. “Thanks,” he manages. “Yeah, I – I think I’ll go in now.”

Passing through the door doesn’t feel as monumental as he’d thought it would. Mostly, the music just gets louder and the lights get brighter. The stench of sweat is almost overpowering, and even though it’s not yet midnight, the room is packed enough that Mac can’t see a path to the bar that avoids all of the writhing, grinding male bodies. He feels a flush work its way up his spine, blood swirling beneath his skin. At once, he’s overheated and freezing cold, goosebumps crawling over his arms and sweat gathering under them. Maybe if Dennis were here, he’d say he was having another panic attack; maybe if Dennis were here, he’d say Mac was turned on. _But he’s not here_ , Mac thinks, and looks over at the bar.

And thinks, _Oh, shit. There he is._

There’s glitter in Dennis’ hair, glinting under the shifting lights, and at first Mac thinks he might have progressed to full-on hallucinations. But there’s no way he could have imagined Dennis looking like this, considering the wardrobe consisting mainly of button-ups and striped sweaters.

Mac vaguely recognizes the black tank top from eleven years ago; he remembers trying to get Dennis drunk on their cheapest tequila, remembers Dennis taking a couple of shots with him before saying, “I’ve got somewhere to be,” running a sticky hand through Mac’s hair and laughing when Mac slapped him away. He remembers, still, how red Dennis’ lips had been. There’s been one major alteration, however, in that Dennis appears to have cut off the bottom half of the shirt entirely, leaving his stomach (also glittery) on display to the gaggle of men surrounding his section of the bar. Mac can’t quite tell from this distance, but it seems like he’s wearing the good kind of makeup, the kind that takes an hour or so to perfect, with the blended smoky eye and the berry-pink stained lips.

He thinks he’s going to pass out.

“Hey, babe, you gotta get out of the way, people are trying to get in,” a voice from behind him says. He turns, dazed.

“That bartender,” he says. “Uh, have you been here before?”

“Every Thursday, my man.” The guy slaps him on the shoulder, friendly. He’s Asian, with a vibrant purple streak through the upwards swoop of his hair. He might’ve been a nice guy to sleep with, if not for Mac’s current existential crisis.

“The bartender, uh, the one in the crop top? Is he new?”

“Not at all! He’s been here since before I started coming. Name’s Dennis. And I’ve heard he does sleep with the customers sometimes, if they’re cute enough.” The guy winks, looking Mac up and down. “I reckon you’d have a chance with him.”

“Oh, um, it’s not – he’s my roommate. I didn’t know he worked here,” Mac stammers. “But – did you, ever…?”

“Don’t worry, he’s not my type,” purple-hair says.

“Right. Thanks.” He turns back to watch Dennis, who’s pouring shots with his typical lack of precision. Dee always says that half of their booze budget goes on Dennis spilling shit on the bar.

Mac covers the room in ten strides, not bothering with _excuse me_ s or _coming through_ s. His mind is roiling with too many emotions to make sense of, but he powers through, pushing past the crowd of Dennis’ admirers and planting himself directing in his eyeline.

“Oh. Fuck,” Dennis says. “Um. Fancy seeing you here?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here are Some Things:  
> 1\. that line about lesbians liking dennis goes out to my fellow dennis lesbians  
> 2\. did dennis and charlie make out while they were watching cocktail? you tell me, but just assume that if it's a fic i've written, dennis and charlie have made out at least a couple of times  
> 3\. thank you to the incomparable other ellie (@alvvayssunny on twitter) who helped me with motivation and also dennis' rainbow outfit  
> 4\. i feel like i owe credit to some people for the "mac and dennis were banging in season 5" theory (i think it's izzy @macden on tumblr??) and the "dennis has secretly been moonlighting as a bartender at the rainbow since season 1" theory (???)  
> 5\. as always, please talk to me in the comments below or on twitter (@lesbiandennis)/tumblr (@lesbian-dennis)

**Author's Note:**

> main twitter: [@davidfinchher](https://twitter.com/davidfinchher)  
> tumblr: [@lesbian-dennis](http://lesbian-dennis.tumblr.com)  
> letterboxd: [@davidfinchher](https://letterboxd.com/davidfinchher)  
> ko-fi: [@elliehopes](https://ko-fi.com/elliehopes)


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